Eyebrows were raised when Stagwell announced last November it struck a deal with defense and surveillance firm Palantir to build an AI-powered data and audience platform. But Stagwell CEO Mark Penn knew Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp and believed the power of Palantir would help the challenger holdco to build something different and better than its older but bigger competitors.
So Penn hired John Kahan, who chaired the board of directors of Stagwell until last year, and has a 40-year work history in data and analytics at IBM and Microsoft, to oversee the work with Palantir as chief AI officer and interim CEO of Stagwell’s Marketing Cloud. Kahan was initially reluctant to take on the task, he told Digiday, as he had planned to ease his way into retirement but Penn talked him into the job. (Elspeth Rollert has since taken over The Marketing Cloud having returned from maternity leave.)
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